In the course of conducting business, a company often specifically is requested to provide price quotations with respect to particular products and/or services that have been identified by a customer or potential customer. In other cases, the customer or potential customer merely identifies its needs in a general manner (without reference to specific items of hardware, software or services) and requests a proposed solution and a price quotation for implementing the solution. In still other cases, the customer or potential customer makes a request that includes a mixture of both specifically identified items and a solution to generally identified needs. Such a request may be made to a single vendor or simultaneously to multiple vendors.
Responding to such a request often is difficult, particularly for very large companies having many geographically dispersed divisions and sites. For example, estimating the internal cost of components of the response often is challenging because the divisions and sites may not share a common cost structure, and their own internal costs may fluctuate frequently depending on external factors such as exchange rates, market conditions, and availability of resources. A number of different approaches have been taken with respect to this problem.
According to one approach, the company utilizes a global internal costing model. An advantage of this approach is that it usually is fairly fast at generating a quotation (or estimate) and then subsequently revising the estimate in the event that the customer's requirements change. Unfortunately, it often is extremely difficult to create and maintain a global internal costing model that accurately reflects the company's lowest global cost of delivering each potential product or service, while accounting for all possible variations. As a result, such a model often suffers from inaccuracy, high costs to maintain, or a combination of these problems.
Another approach is to make inquiries to each of the divisions or sites that are possible sources for each of the products or services that are to be included in each new customer pricing quotation. However, this too typically is very expensive and, potentially even worse, extremely time-consuming. Accordingly, employing this approach often results in significant delays, both in producing the initial quotation and then subsequently revising it in the event the customer's requirements change. In addition, coordinating all of the necessary people for each quotation and subsequent revision typically is highly cumbersome, at the very least. After multiple revision requests, it is not uncommon for at least some of the people involved to lose interest and become non-responsive, thus further impairing the company's ability to quickly respond to customers' requests.